Stefan Arteni

Stefan Arteni
Stefan
Stefan Arteni

Stefan
The Form Of The Form

SolInvictus Press 2006

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Ultimate dream
The path will descend
Straight and so weightless
Toward the abyss
Adrian Maniu

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The Form of The Form

Cybernetics is the art of creating

equilibrium between possibilities
and constraints.
Ernst von Glasersfeld

A fractally constellated visual structure of echoes and correspondences, of reflexive loops, an

operational logic of visual graphic relations, schematic rendering and graphic archetypes, a
system of notational graphic marks, a semasiographic articulated symbolic system which
contains layers of encoded information and is not tied to spoken language, are embodied
medially as a joint product of the artificer's cultural constraints and the sort of traces produced
by the available tools and mediums. The empty mark acts as a visual suggestion. "But
perceptibility itself as a… (however conspicuous) optical mark does not yet constitute
communication," writes Niklas Luhmann. He continues: "And even if someone recognizes that
the object of perception (the 'sign') has been produced by way of an intentional act, that is,
'technically' or 'artificially' in the original sense, this does not yet mean that it can be understood
as the communication of a piece of information." The first mark is arbitrary, contingent, and
discriminatory. Though it is empty, its emptiness confers upon it a ritual perfection. It exists in a
continuous space, it generates form systems, and it marks the interface between itself and the
unmarked space. Compositionality is a way of organizing marks as distinctions. The operational
distinction indicates the artist's existence. "Ultimately, the form…is the form of the distinction
that 'it' makes…," remarks Louis H. Kauffman. Sign systems (signs, i.e the distinctions they stand
for) are historically contingent and culturally divergent. Or, to put it another way, in the logic of
Nagarjuna, the closed net of distinctions is defined in context - the net of memory appears as if it
were the universe. "The drawing of a distinction…is an operation of cultivation: we have to
presuppose the unavailable without which nothing is going to happen, " writes Dirk Baecker.
Louis H. Kauffman remarks: "As the closures occur, that sign becomes a sign for itself…The mark
is a sign for itself where 'itself' is a distinction drawn in the plane. The mark signifies a distinction
and the distinction that is signified is made by the mark itself. The mark refers to itself, but that
self is a sign in a context of signs..." William Edmonson indicates that arrangements of signs are
themselves signs, with conventional aspects of their interpretation.

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Lotfi Zadek interprets possibility as a constraint on variables. C.S.Peirce saw change or chaos as a
firstness of primary potentialities, constraints as secondness, and patterns as thirdness. Peircean
semiotics is deeply rooted in the scholastic tradition and is known for its resumption of
premodern themes. Ernst von Glasersfeld makes reference to the apophatic view in connection
with the seed of radical constructivist ideas. "Buddhism moves toward radical apophasis,
denying any positive role for language in the awakening experience," writes David. R. Brockman.

The interest in non-verbal manifestations of Lakoffian culture-specific idealized cognitive models,

accounting for visual prototype effects by means of image-schemata, metonimy and metaphor
models, is still a fairly recent development. Investigating and theorizing pictorial and other non-
verbal models is important not only as a means to test, and elaborate, George Lakoff's project of
charting idealized cognitive models, but also as an instrument to help integrate cognitivist
approaches with culture-oriented ones, that is with thought styles or cognitive models where
particular modes of experience are favored. As Michael Kimmel underscores, "every cognitive
cultural template is chosen against a ground of other possibilities." Drid Williams' semasiological
theory presents image-schemata as sets of potentialities that each culture will utilize differently.
R. Langacker indicates that a schema is an organized abstract framework of objects and relations,
whereas a prototype consists of a specified set of expectations. A prototype is a highly typical
instantiation or instance of a schema. When one considers culture, it is the intersubjective
schemas pertaining to the 'consensual domain' that are relevant. Roy D'Andrade employs the
term 'cultural models.' According to D'Andrade, "a cultural model is a cognitive schema that is
intersubjectively shared by a social group." A reinterpretation of Michael Kimmel's notion of
dynamic switches between culture-embedded ontologies through image-schemata
transformations and encompassing cases of partial compatibility, may be horizontally extended
to include non-linguistic phenomena.

A paradigm shift needs to take place that embraces the counter-intuitive concept that something
without meaning or intentionality can be a recursive visual structure or pattern. Katie Bentley
argues that stigmergic systems provide better generic tools to investigate optimal and indeed
aesthetic designs. She writes: "Stigmergic swarm intelligence occurs as a representationless and
distributed pattern producing process. Similarly, parallel rule-based systems [Lindenmayer
systems or L-systems, introduced by Aristid Lindenmayer] exhibit the curious phenomenon of
data base amplification, they have the ability to generate complex structures from small data
sets."

Polyglossia [including the contestation of cultural systems, hence of ways of thinking] enables
both the centrifugal and the centripetal, both dissimilation and assimilation, to co-exist. Inter-
contextural transitions, that is transjunctional operations, produce multi-simultaneous
heterarchical formal domains, that is a polycontextural formal matrix where, instead of a semio-
translation, there is a polyfactorial intra- and meta-artistic awareness. Transjunction causes ludic
inter-tanglings including a ‘creative misinterpretation’ of surface topology. Meta-awareness
allows one to step back in order to consider the form and structure. Antony Adolf remarks that
such formalizations are self-conscious, insofar as, having more than one system at one's disposal,
the artist will decide which to use. Intertwined sequences and processes, reiterated acts and the
impossibility of invariant repetition, an embodied algorithmic performative-meditative-
improvisational state, constitute a multi-negational heterarchy, the transjunctional parallelism of
the network. Such interacting processes constitute a higher order of circularity and parallelism
and a correlation between circularities and antinomies. De- and/or re-semiotization highlight
the inherent instability of signification and the looseness of reference of high-context signs.
'Originality,' therefore, does not suggest the modern notion of an erasure of tradition as a
breakthrough, but rather the sense of utilizing the highest potential of a millennial legacy of
traditioning which has recourse to preformulated, prefabricated building blocks as it relies, on

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the one hand, on recurring patterns within a creative-formulaic continuum and , on the other
hand, on the paradoxical combination of contingency and necessity.

The heavier the burden, the closer our

lives come to the earth, the more real
and truthful they become.
. Milan Kundera

Byzantine legacy is a way of being in the world, a high-context matrix of visual, intuitive,
contemplative, indirect communication, releasing visual events into a mytho-cultural
appreciation which privileges material instantiation of images over informational pattern. The
field of perception was conformed by an oral-plus-chirographic culture. J.P.Lewis suggests that
fuzzy structures or class of patterns specified by example may lead to novel visual constructs.
This is achieved by means of a sort of creative computation which 'refines' random creations in
correlation with the input pattern. The archetypal imagic constitutive similarity and otherness
subsist in spite of the many physical-material variations from one instantiation to the other.
Figuration as trans-figuration rests on the relational aspect of the image, on a notion of
equivalence, not on an exact resemblance. This has as direct effect a ritualist dimension of any
activity, a ritual cultural imprinting, where the expressiveness of the style conceived as an
interplay of directed visual tensions and ocular memory is syntactically strengthened.

Niels Brügger differentiates between medial substratum and medial material content. “The
substratum is part of the medium on, or in, which the material content is placed”. An example is
the artwork in which the paper is the substratum and what is put on the paper, for instance black
ink, is the material content. Jesper Taekke gives further comments: "Material content must not be
confused with content (the meanings that might emerge through knowledge about the coding
system). In this sense the material content is meaningless. Second, the substratum must not be
confused with the medium as such. The substratum is part of the medium but only one part, the
other being the material content. The media must also be divided into three areas - production,
distribution and consumption. According to Brügger, to characterize, for instance, the area of
production of media, one must answer the following threefold question: what is the substratum
of the medium, how does it make the production of material content possible, and what is this
material content?" The medial quality itself introduces a feedback and reveals a certain
perception perspective. "Communication generally is observation of form in a medium", notes
Dirk Baecker. He suggests "…to turn any possible form into the medium of a possible different
form and to considers these forms as a calculus on the codependence of marked and unmarked
states." The image construct medium, the endless chain of appropriation and transfer, is form in
the material medium, exemplifying the reduplication of the difference between medium and
form in forms that in turn can be used as medium. Whichever material medium the work appears
in, there are inherent medial features which deflect and deform the message. In this transitional
zone between materiality and symbols, constructs have a fractal and mosaic topology - visual
perception itself may be inherently non-Euclidean.

Every medium implies a certain community. "Eveything takes place in the irreal world of
sense…sense is a certain model of reality as presented by representations we use", writes Andrzej
Chmielecki. Lucian Blaga speaks about a magical-mythical awareness, while Mircea Eliade
describes a "mystical empathy with the cosmic rhythms". Aaron Gurwitsch remarks that visual
appearance, the perceptual datum, "has its phenomenal identity only within a contexture" - a
culture is often observed to be latent, a tacit knowledge or habitus. Vittorio Benussi argues that
"mental habit is a simulation of evidence". Primacy of the eye establishes and legitimizes a visual

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paradigm - visual parainformation, the primordial elemental type of information, and structural
information composed of pieces of parainformation. Vision becomes haptic and generates a
haptic space. The eye is trained to navigate through the complex visual semiosphere - the act of
seeing is not instantaneous, it spans through time and it is associated with ocular motility.
"Seeing consists of a series of gestures," remarks Brian Rotman.

Art has a complex antinomical nature - it is both ideal and real, universal and individual, ergon
and energeia. A picture plane is energy. Context and changefulness are the attributes of seeing.
Pavel Florensky speaks of the bewildering view of the kaleidoscope. A kenotic space destabilizes
perception, repositions and deploys an open-ended experience which gathers the meanderings
of memory. By modulating emptiness through a calculus of distinctions, all form may be seen to
arise from a void. Relations are replotted into an aesthetic axis. Color qualities act as attractors.
Cognitive mapping does not cease to reach for an invisible yet tangible universal. "The
symbol…is mediating and mediated life…a form through which reality flows", writes Viacheslav
Ivanov.

"The Greek eikon, meaning image originating in likeness and semblance and recalling mimesis,
becomes icon, which no longer imitates but offers now, by means of its unity, a prototype to
imitate", remarks Constantin Noica. The virtual space of painting is neither fully present nor fully
absent, it is a space for which the existence of referents would be irrelevant, it implies a
distinction between patterns and interpretation of patterns. Reticent and laconic, the icon is
separation that joins or, in the Areopagite's words, a "dissimilar similarity".

"The meaning of meaning is both richness of references and tautological circularity", notes Niklas
Luhmann. Roland Barthes speaks of a 'negative semiosis' - the sign becomes apophatic in nature,
it always refers to another sign and never to the actual object itself, or, as Floyd Merrell suggests,
"given the disconcerting irretrievability of a first sign and the impossibility of reaching a final
sign, there can be no interpretant without a predecessor and a successor". The context of an
interpretant is a perspective. Visual rhetoric is integral to communication. Bruno Latour suggests
that, on the one hand, the overload of images leads to iconoclasm, while, on the other hand,
"images demonstrate transformation, not information". Only the whole series iterated
diachronically, from antiquity all up to nowadays, has meaning. "To study an art form is to
explore a sensibility", notes Clifford Geertz, "such a sensibility is a collective formation…as wide
as social existence and as deep". It is assumed of any viewer that he/she knows the images -
hence deliberate omissions, ellipses, parallelity and conformity, self-similar syncopations,
indirect and covered-up references, rupturing of the narrative, abstraction and unreality. It is
certainly possible to view apophasis both as overflow and as paring away - both can be placed
under the category of play. Apophasis leads to a positive valuation of images. This multiple
negation and ludic tautology leaves what is as it is, but only in a painting that centers on the
citational plurality of the material sign-vehicle and refers endlessly to painting. In terms of
encoding, there is only recursivity of formal selections and of their performative functions, that is
transformation of the diachronic flow of formal visual constructs. "In cybernetic terms, observer
and observed are unconsciously merged during the act of making…this stage depends upon
procedural memory," writes Terry Marks-Tarlow. The ritual is an actual standing and living
within art, a participation in it, and at the same time an active partaking in maintaining the
process or, as Dirk Baecker puts it, "unmarked states do not exist for first-order observers, and
they only exist for second-order observers as marks of…matters excluded." The relationship
between the forming of ritual form and the emergence of possibility from within virtuality
becomes autopoietic. This is the relationship between the emergence of play and ritual.

The indeterminacy of signification noted by the Schoolmen became a component of Peirce's

theory, drawing attention to an apophatic trend grounded in what Gregory of Nyssa named

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diastema (distance, ontological gap,) a concept that may be used as a metaphor for the distinction
between the graphic identity of visually presented marks and content. Relations of
determination are emergent properties of formal systems, but the artist feels free to move from
one to the other by evading reduction to a referential play and by taking into account presemiotic
operational appropriation, the diachronicity of the iterative process and the spectrum of glyphic
variation, the graphic aspect of glyphic systems, the mythoglyphs and the iconical graphemes
which gesture the movement of life itself.

"Art rests on all-pervasive entropy against which anything that persists must organize itself",
writes Niklas Luhmann. By cultivating an agonistic relation with predecessors, the artist
reinvents visual literacy. It is the topology of processes and experiential formal structures and
their interdependence at very different time scales which is truly a heterarchy opening to
elsewhereness and implying adaptive, dynamic multi-connectivity, every new actualization
being a manifestation of a newly envisioned possible.

Dumitru Staniloae argues for the significance of 'potential' : "The East intuits the unbounded
wealth of potentiality without which any act is something limited ". The nothing is a meon, or a
potentiality of being. Reality is actualization of the potential. "The Real is, by definition, forever
veiled, while Reality is accessible to our knowledge", writes Basarab Nicolesco. The symbol is a
case in point. Yuri Lotman indicates that "symbols represent compressed mnemonic programs",
while Z. G. Minc argues that "formerly abandoned symbols were…conveyed from a current
symbol set to a potential symbol set".

Mark making appears to derive from the rhythmic repetition of gestural routines. Marks become
chronotopic indexes of practice. The organized mass of marks is itself a mark, a complex mark.
The etiology of ritual art is vestigially present in the ancient meaning of the terms grammata, that
is scratchings, and semata, that is marks not necessarily attached to human speech. Marking
strategies represent cognitively and semantically different systems, explaining 'otherness' as a
product of unshared 'image-schemata', but implicit here is the question of a continuous spiritual
thread which links the successive sources. Though culturally refracted, the same light shines in
the East and in the Far East. This perspective emerges in a Zen story's reference to the plane of
virtualities: anything that happens was already in existence - as a potential. What is present
becomes contingent, and what is different becomes comparable.

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein is convinced that there is a striking parallel between Byzantine and
Japanese aesthetics. The mute-optical element has priority. Acts of formalization create a reality
of their own, a reality that is strictly a formal one, a style mediated only through style, a reality
which presents nothing but itself - style as a virtual world, or, paradoxically, as virtual irreality.

Self-organization of visual communicative interactions plays a major role in the emergence of

symbolization. Autopoiesis theory indicates that self-producing systems cannot be controlled
exclusively from within or without and their constitutive events are difficult to forecast.
Complexity theory suggests that the Edge of Chaos is more than a balance point - instability with
order - it is also a point of unpredictable emergence within the context of a ludic cybernetic view
of art. Simple rules, non-random events, act on random events and can produce complex
patterns. The details of these applications have various connections to the ideas of convergence
toward eigenvalues seen as attractors. Eigenvalues or perceptual regularities are stable self-
produced values that result of recursive operations and thus imply circularity. "Eigenvalues
[stable structures] represent the externally observable manifestations of the introspectively
accessible cognitive operations," writes Heinz von Foerster.

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 Being begins anew in every moment:
around any 'here' revolves the sphere of
'there'. And the center is everywhere. The
way of eternity is curved.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Cultural ecology and cultural geography engage with specific complex systems and systems of
systems as well as with the construction of boundary zones and their inherent elusiveness. Brian
Ward writes: "recursive symmetry in chaos theory…echoes Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy of
'eternal return'…(we should see eternal return as a cyclical process where events return to
similar…events)…complex systems come back again and again to near the same situations".
According to John R. Van Eenwyk, “the oscillatory dynamics (tensions of opposites) that
generate myths and rituals enliven them as well, by bringing up new possibilities. Thus, creation
occurs over and over again....So, the eternal return is an iterative dynamic: it allows the present
to be fed back into the original equation. While all archetypal processes generate feedback
dynamics, the eternal return is the epitome of all such aspects of archetypal processes. It is the
archetype of archetypal dynamics, so to speak.” Archetypal vortices form the boundary-layer
fractal stochastic phenomena.

The borderland of the Byzantine cultural space "is a world governed by good or evil forces, by
calls and silences, by displays, appearances and screenings…by fatalism defined as an
integration of the human being into the universal rhythm", writes Mircea Vulcanescu, reinforcing
the palimpsestic metaphor implying multifacetedness, polyglotism, illegibilities and erasures.
Nae Ionescu observes: "The lonely human…can not intervene in history…he can only 'cultivate' "
[the Latin colere, to cultivate, refers to both culture and tilling the soil, and is related to cultus,
care, adoration]. The stress on visual interfaces, discontinuity and metamorphoses, is
underpinned by an evasive and implied topography of moveable roots and pasts. By the
geographic accident of locating one's origins in a borderland, one becomes a dweller of the in-
between and of the margins. This entails a foundational polyglotism across cultural and artistic
habitats. The existential chronotope hinges on the emergence of fractality that encompasses
networked systems where thresholds change the nature of relationships between formal
repertoires.

From the beginning, a translocal multi-identiy web and a recursiveness of identity recreation, a
being between and astride cultures and moving across languages and visual contextures set side
by side, imply a second-order perspective, an experiential metacultural sensibility - that is a
shift toward looking at the gaze itself. An inner metalanguage, multiple inheritances and
multiple codings, are at work. Second-order culture delineations are continuously reconstructed.
The new entities produced by the peripatetic impulse open up a situational space which revels in
the freedom of a horizonal in-between transcending untranslatable knots - a polyphonic
monologue. Doris Runey points out that polyglots are "not 'in the world' but rather 'in worlds',
dwelling in the liminal space of simultaneous belongingness and non-belongingness. By taking a
proper approach to the notions of paradox, the paradox of simultaneous identity and alterity,
and to the notion of self-reference, one may argue that on this level of second-order observations
all statements become contingent. Second-order cybernetics is more concerned with
morphogenesis and positive feedback loops, a behaviour which is recursive and generates
variety. The virtual borderland of culture, a place where increasing entropy could be overcome,
works as a memetic attractor in the surprising intersections of fractal chaos and embedment.
Communication will pass across but will be modified on the way. Nobert Fenze indicates that
many authors define information as a measure of 'quantity of form', to inform means 'to put in-to
a form'. To be clear, in congruence with Luhmann, this definition reveals a distinction between

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information and the selection of the form of its utterance. The relation between the two sides of
the distinction is fuzzy - one may be unaware of information and one may be aware of
uncommunicable things. Understanding will decide which side of the distinction is meaningful.
Communications as utterances are syntactic forms where utterances are preceded and followed
by other utterances orienting themselves through consequences of former selections within a
context of potentialities. A basic requirement of the syntactic system is that it must keep
producing new signifiers out of old ones. In syntactics, transformability is of relevance, if
transformations of signs into [other] signs are formalized. As Niklas Luhmann puts it, the
medium in which the autopoiesis of art occurs is purely that of syntax.

"A cybernetic model works by setting up constraints," remarks Ernst von Glasersfeld. Art
operates with constraints rather than with efficient causes - it only eliminates what does not fit,
and this means learning the viable path. "Forms are created from the concatenation of operations
upon themselves and…are…rather indications of processes…The closed loop of perception
occurs in the eternity of present individual time," writes Louis H. Kauffman. Thus one may
speak of circular operationality, of the recursive self-implication of form, and also of indirect
recursion when two or more procedures cyclically call each other. Form implies itself as a meta-
distinction, as a form of form.

All our past coexists with each present.

Gilles Deleuze

"Newness manifests itself contrary to intention and accompanied by the consciousness of its own
inevitability, and this is its profound distinction from avant-garde innovation, self-enraptured
and aggressive", writes Mikhail Epstein. One should not universalize the gloomy temporariness
of the Western dominant code, the fetishization of certain ideas of artistic and cultural quality,
the nihilistic essence of the contemporary art world and its infinite acceleration toward a non-
destination ultimately leading to disintegration - an "act of self-abolition", as Nietzsche wrote.
"The nearer the center, the more petrified the action field", notes V. N. Toporov.

Luc Ferry remarks: "The break with tradition itself becomes tradition". To put it in Niklas
Luhmann's words, if art communication is seen as "technical codes through which systemic
operations arrange and perpetuate themselves", the avantgarde consists in "the self-negation of
art being realized at the level of autopoietic operations in the form of art, so that art can
continue". The paradox consists, on the one hand, in the comodification of the avantgarde, and
on the other hand, in the characteristic move of avantgarde prophets who will veer towards
totalitarianism. Paul Virilio suggests that "beyond a certain threshold la différance begins to work
in reverse, against itself, actively promoting a state of general undifferentiation". One should
recall Susan Buck-Morss' advice and "blast holes in established interpretations of the twentieth
century".

Milan Knízák points out that globalism and universalism in art are nothing new, they are
perduring and uneven. Patrick Boylan argues that pragmatic accommodation (viewing oneself
through the eyes of another) will not subsume cultural accommodation, the 'outgroup' has a
different 'mode of being' - a memory community consists of conventions 'netted' through time.
Facing the decay of form, the artist works in opposition to a 'public sphere' which glorifies 'bad
painting' and anticulture as the apex of contemporary practice - an opposition entailing
recognizable schismogenetic differentiation of distinct ideologies. The artist produces a
dissonance with a 'global antiart' whose massive forgetfulness is grounded in a negativity based
on ideological concordance with an obsessive adversarial relation to cultural memory and on the

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invisibility of any 'unofficial' art - after all, the 'death of the author' has meant only the
overbearing dominance of the critic and the birth of the curator-author. The Moscow-Tartu
school speaks of antithetical self-description and of enantiomorphic symmetry: global antiart is
constructed isomorphically to art, but it is art with a negative sign .Once the role of suspicion in
communication processes is defined, it then leads to a framing of the problem connected to the
concept of 'noise' as dependent on the observer’s position - the entropic propensity resulting
from stamping out diversity leads to structures being less differentiated and to their decay into
deafening and irrelevant noise masquerading as content. More referentiality does not result in
communication. Robert Axelrod's culture model suggests that, once the number of traits is
reduced, noise (unwanted input to a system) drives the system into a state of global monoculture.
The interaction wipes out diversity.

The paradox of our times is that one talks about world art without having a world system of art.
It is still directed from particular centers of power which decide what is right and what is wrong
for “the world.” In other words, the system of art is not yet an autopoietic system of
communications. It is rather a system comprised of many individual systems or, to use Jeno
Bango's concept, of many individual socio-regions, a socio-region being here defined as a non-
topographical mind region. The hegemonic region thus represents an “obsolete historical
residue” in that it, as no other system, still uses the pernicious marxist fantasy retromeme and its
constricted wooden language as a basis for its operations. "Ironically this situation in itself
provides us with a nice example of how knowledge of evolution acquired in the realm of biology
can help unravel analogous situations in the realm of culture," writes Liane Gabora. She
continues: "In both genetic hitchhiking and its cultural analog there is indirect selection for
useless (or even detrimental) patterns through their association with beneficial ones. The concept
of hitchhiking is closely related to that of exaptation." Milan Kundera pointed out in an
interview some years ago: "The Western intellectual finds it easy to deny his own values and to
mock centuries-old gardens..." The ideological theoretical constructions of the timeless 'no-
place' of Western intelligentsia based on the Gramscian prescription result in evidence of
punctuated, stress-induced and sometimes maladaptive culture change caused by status- or
prestige-biased imitation and indirect bias or meme hitchhiking. Political communication often
parasitically enters the art code. Niels Akerstrom Andersen argues that parasitical
communication is characterized by having a particular codified communication, a parasitic
codification, which uses the plus side of a particular foreign code as a supplement in the attempt
to pursue its own value and never seeks to question the truth through falsification. Overload,
noise, lack of precision and ignorance, construct their limited and contradictory knowledge
under systems of sense that reduce cultural complexity to chiliastic ecstasy. Systematic erasure of
all cultural memory is implicit. Leszek Kolakowski had predicted: "The specter is stronger than
the spells we cast on it. It might come back to life."

If nihilism, as says Nietzsche, consists in the loss of memory,

recovery of memory is a means against nihilism.
Czeslaw Milosz

Julia Kristeva defines the twentieth century as an "age…of exile", an age described by Asen
Davidov as a possible "twilight of the individual". Hamid Naficy identifies as an 'accented' art
"certain ethnocultural, exilic, and authorial sensibilities", that is to say marginocentric forms
which have axiological dimensions of their own and adopt transclassical operational strategies.
Accent changes the grid and coordinates by which one understands art - there is, afterall, a
pervasive East-Central European accent to the École de Paris. The large undefined border zone
apparently suffering from a deficiency of universality - Jaan Kaplinsky argues that borders can

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be seen as an "irreducible space" - the Europe Between, the Third Europe, is never on center
stage. The metaphoric dynamic of centrality, marginality, and in-betweenness, proves unable to
decipher the borderland hieroglyph. It continues to remain unread. "The Europe made up of
little countries is another Europe", writes Milan Kundera. The marginalization-misrecognition of
East-Central and South-Eastern Europe by Western aesthetic ideology is part and parcel of
interpretive models which intend to manipulate or even incorporate the other, it is a kind of blind
spot on the map of visual anthropology, or, to use Giorgio Agamben's words, an inclusive-
exclusion. An accent can lift one out of the routine. Thus, an outsider may sometimes perceive the
unique qualities of a formal system with peculiar clarity. Accent signifies upon painting itself, it
signifies upon painting tradition by means of its production modes and by playfully crossing
generic and stylistic boundaries. Once reinscribed, image systems become nonfunctional, the
artist populates them with his own accent. Simultaneity and polyvalency as strategies suspend
individual referentiality.

Anthony Judge points to the notion of sacrifice (the term sacrifice, from the Latin sacrificium -
sacer, "holy"; facere, "to make" - means to make sacred and can also be understood as the act of
sanctifying or consecrating an object; offering is used as a synonym, or as a more inclusive
category of which sacrifice is a subdivision, and means the presentation of a gift; the word
offering is from the Latin offerre, "to offer, present", and yields the noun oblate; the Latin operari, to
perform, accomplish, evokes once again the idea of sacred action.): “the images are grouped and
regrouped, creating and erasing boundaries, in a centripetal process converging on a unique
configuration of forces in a final ‘efficient-moment’ of sacrifice which reveals the underlying
‘common body of the norm’, the efficient centre of creative action, or ‘embodied-vision’. The
image of sacrifice stands therefore for an activity of eternal return to the radical originating
power through which the multiplicity of perspectives is engendered. It is the efficient centre of
the discontinuities of space of perception and time, or the link between efficient acts and
discontinuous acts. It is not a renunciation of action, but rather a renunciation of the limits of
perspectives which interpretations attach to the structured subject-object sensorium.”

It cannot be stressed too much that indifference to the notion of a telos can be related to the
development of a mythico-ritual mode of apprehending and of a ritual orthopraxy - dromena,
litterally things performed, which have endured in an a-modern East and are connected with the
spirit of play for its own sake. Joseph Needham has beautifully discussed the correlative view
prevalent in premodern cultures, that is layered traditions and the dissipative forces involved in
transmission. Following Steve Farmer, it is perhaps worth pointing out that correlative
perspectives or correlative systems and their self-similar and fractal structures have deep
neurobiological roots.

Marcel Griaule speaks of 'graphic facts' constituting a shared repository of materialized memory.
The function of the concrete mark is conceived by Simon Battestini in an experiential ritual
context, ritual being viewed as a crucial process in the texture of memory storing and
communicative cultural behavior. Roger Schank introduces the notions of dynamic memory
framework and Memory Organization Packet theory, that is continuously refined experience-
based memory schemata. "An observer is the link between himself and his observing self,"
suggests Ernst von Glasersfeld. Elaborate but thrifty graphic formulaic symbolic clusters of
notation and their metrical rhythmic systems are trans-linguistic, they are not tied to any
language. Graphical processing re-makes, re-creates, re-members the system each time it is
actualized. The artist is a thoughtful guardian of lore.

The play of art is a shift in reality. Art appears as a principle of setting up an involved relation.
Making a collage-web of de/recontextualized transferable commentarial and synecdochic
quotations which absorb and transform each other and become always different by reproducing

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themselves, of self-borrowings, paraphrases, and allusions processed through a kind of mis-
reading which helps overcome influences, is part of the culture of East-Central Europe which
defies dominant Western 'progressive' narratives by evolving a strategy of the radical existential
questions of our time: Is there a supreme telos? Can 'nonhistoric' peoples experience a 'return of
history'? Where and why did history go wrong? What would have been if it had been otherwise
than it was? Within the context of Erving Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor, the people barely
mentioned in history, the people that history forgot, will be defined as being removed from the
stage - their senseless suffering, a suffering without redemption, is described by the obscure
folktale riddle: "If you turn right, you will be in sorrow, if you turn left, you will be in sorrow as
well".

The artist is condemned to live inside style and live through style. The fragmentary style is both
an ontological principle and an artistic principle. By fragments one searches, in a discontinuous
manner, the ontological fundaments of any activity, including art. Creating a fragmentary
existential and visual formal adventure characterized by the will for unfinished, the painter makes
a comment and a reflection on a massively fractured culture

We're living in a world which is, after all,

ruled by Manichaean, hostile gods.
Leszek Kolakowski

The artist is the messenger, the bearer of an utterance which has the "color of the fate in which it
arose", as Hoelderlin once said. Michel Serres has drawn a cogent analogy between the ancient
role of the messenger - the Greek angelía means message - and the apparently secularized
information society. The unfolding message is transposed into wholly visual constructs shown
sequentially or simultaneously. The artist is the manipulator of an evocative contingent
repertoire and a multiplicity of stylistic perspectives filtered by means of what Virgil Nemoianu
calls "patterns of substitution", an oblique evocative re-vision and refraction modeled on musical
composition strategies. The whole work is a tightly woven web of improvisational self-reference,
of imagic and diagrammatic iconicity as characters in sign-system complexes, based on what J.
Drucker and J. McGann call a pictographic composition or metagraphic rhetoric of graphs in
relation to the abstract ordering of their visual form at a level of structure. Jack M. Greenstein
argues that "Alberti's definition of composition gives surfaces the…primacy…". Sets of self-
reflexive systems connect to or generate identifiable artistic practices. Different structures of
meaning coexist - purely artistic relationships, programmatic, and artistic-philosophical,
including thus all levels of perception. "Meaning emerges as a self-organizing web of fuzzy
patterns," writes Ben Goertzel. The painting game focuses attention upon implicitly reflexive
relationships, the 'gap' between image and painting, painting as object-language and
metalanguage at the same time, and the self-reference of all communication.

A work is, in and of itself, a re-reading of cultural signifiers. By engaging a work's

indeterminacies the viewer recognizes that filling the empty signifier with content cannot be
regulated except in the context of a cultural code, a perceptographic code, which ritualizes and
lays down patterns. Leonid Tchertov opines that from a semiotic point of view a configuration of
spots and lines stimulating perception can be considered not as a single sign, but as a set of
"sense-distinctive" relations forming together a visual-spatial construct of a particular kind. Such
visual-spatial construct functions as a "perceptogram", which, on the one hand, acts expressively
regarding the creator, and, on the other hand, acts impressively in relation to the spectator, and
only by this condition may perform also a representative function relating each perceptive
construct to an external referent Despite the fact that the signal-indexical means of such

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perceptography are derivative from the perceptual code, they can be distinguished as an
autonomous group and considered as a special perceptographic code. As an external artificial
modification of the perceptual code it does not mediate intra-subjective processes of cognition,
but inter-subjective processes of visual communication. Its semiotic means differ from the means
of the naturally formed and unconsciously used perceptual code, because they are selected as
results of reflection in processes of inter-subjective visual communication, and are medially
embodied in a cultural tradition. Within the compositional organization system the artist uses a
recursive dynamic stochastic operational algorithm for generating medium constrained
structures which must be interpreted in the context of perceptographic domain knowledge to
produce a symbolic representation. As Tchertov puts it, the perceptographic code is rather a
characteristic of form.

On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath,

the unintelligible truth.
Milan Kundera

The contested core/periphery notion yields to the concept of shifting centers and
peripheralization in core regions. Czeslaw Milosz implies that centers can move and suggests the
end of the French universal - Paris is extinct, at most a continuity of ruins. Southeast Europe may
be paradoxically problematized as both the cradle and periphery of Europe. Crossroads, once
considered to be the most magical places, may undoubtedly become infernal liminal zones. East-
Central Europe must be reconceptualized as a border-space - it consists of borderlands lying at
the intersection of cultures, the East of the West and the West of the East, and therein lies its
fascination. The cultural borderline, however, is blurred. It becomes that from which
multicentricity and crisscrossing of flows and counterflows and the aesthetic articulation of
identity begin their presencing.

It is time to demand once again a maximum of complexity from the artwork. It is time to use
again constraints in order to expand the room of art. Art can be reconnected with the chain of
predecessors by reclaiming and renewing archaic memory, by restoring a larger and deeper
constellation of sense beyond egolatry and egophany and beyond dominant ideologems. Zen
emphasizes a transhistorical present in terms of an ever-renewable cyclicality, such as the play of
condensed and interwoven mythologems, the return of recalcitrant myth, the cultural matrix
concerned with archetypal fields and with damnation and redemption, the matrix which has
survived displaced or camouflaged in contemporary secular culture or as a secular caricature,
lurking in the subterranean memory and waiting to spring forth. Experience-oriented spirituality
in Eastern and Far Eastern practices come together in layers of complexity and inspiration that
resonate beyond the temporal realm. Continual endless juxtapositions explore ways to
manipulate and restructure perception. The mark appears as a chronotopic palimpsest, the
gesture and/or the performativity of the self as immediate enstatic experience. If one looks upon
a medium as form, it is visible.

Haiyan Shen comments on the hermeneutics of marks, as formulated by Chih-i [Zhiyi], the
founder of the T'ien-t'ai [Tiantai, in Japanese Tendai] Buddhist school: "By pointing out how the
'black ink as form' (Hei-mo-se) can possibly work out in the development of various strokes in
formulating various characters (with their different meanings), Chih-i [Zhiyi] presents an
ontological concept about one dharma containing all dharmas, and all dharmas being identical to
one dharma. 'One dharma contains all dharmas' is demonstrated by Chih-i from the black ink (as
form) that functions to draw multitude strokes, from which various characters are formed. Since
all characters are derived from strokes and all strokes are derived from the black ink (as form),

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this demonstrates that all dharmas are identical to one dharma." Loreta Poskaite describes the
empty mark modulating emptiness: "The cosmogonic and cosmostructural conception of the
process of painting was formulated and summarized in Shi Tao’s (Yuan Ji’s) theory of painting.
According to him, painting is the great way for changing (hua) the universe. Its essence lies in
One stroke (yi hua, yi bi) that was conceived by Shi Tao as the sign of the transformation of being
and non-being, embracing all the universe and bringing out the idea or principle (li) nurtured
inside. The One stroke is the microcosmic embodiment of the macrocosm, as it reveals what is
great through what is small. The One may be associated with Dao, the absolute, which was talked
about in Laozi, Zhuangzi, Yijing. It is hidden in and beyond every thing, giving birth to the two
(yin and yang, the strong and weak line) wherefrom ten thousand things spring up. The variety of
their configurations is expressed through the sixty-four hexagrams of Yijing, understood as the
transformations of the One stroke (yi hua)."

In the final instance, the all-embracing interwoven web of operational cultural dynamics,
strongly embedded in Eastern spirituality and entwined in paradox, disseminates over different
models a practice simultaneously underpinning and negating human understanding. Eugene
Gorny suggests that experiencing is a result of auto-communication - in autocommunication the
content of the message is less important than its form and it involves a constant reviewing under
a more marked formal organization - while Francisco Varela speaks of a selfless self, of
perceptually guided embodied action and sensorimotor contingency.

The artist shapes and is shaped by the work. As George Spencer-Brown underscores, "logic and
computation, grammar and rhetoric, balance and perspective can be seen in the work after it is
created, but these forms are, in the final analysis, parasitic on, they have no existence apart from,
the creativity of the work itself."

Stefan Arteni

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